this week it feels like i've failed at my job

The trans community is grieving, and the sports world is silent.

What follows is a stream-of-consciousness post about my grief at the state of the world. It’s unedited. I am a trans journalist who has spent most of my career trying to prevent the actions we’ve seen this week. It would mean a lot to me if you subscribed to support my work. Paying subscriptions help me continue to cover my community even when mainstream media doesn’t see the value in it.

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I’ve been trying to write this post for two days now, but I’m not really sure what to say. I’m a journalist and my job is to report in ways that educate the public, or to have informed opinions that (hopefully) impact the cultural conversation. But as I sit with President Trump’s executive order to ban trans women and girls from playing girls’ school sports, the NCAA’s decision to comply with the order in advance, and the relative silence on the issue from the women’s sports community at-large, I mostly feel a deep sense of sadness.

I’ve spent the better part of the last near-decade writing about trans athletes. A large part of that work has been reporting and debunking the myths and misinformation that contribute to fearmongering and exclusionary policies for our community. Another huge chunk of that work has been an attempt to re-shape the public narrative around trans athletes, highlighting the ways they are thriving or simply existing, showing they are not a threat to anyone but are instead real people who are an asset to the sporting communities they touch. I even won a national journalism award for my work on why trans kids should have access to sports.

I have spent many years being told by editors that my pitches are “too niche.” I have had my work sanitized. I have been asked for “proof” when I write sentences like, “Most trans kids are not trying to be the next Olympian, they just want to play sports with their friends.” I’ve had problematic language edited into my stories. I’ve been told I’m overreacting when I’ve tried to draw the line between the rhetoric around trans exclusion in sports and the way it leads to the exclusion of trans folks from other public spaces.

Those of us who have been on this beat for a long time now have spent much of that time screaming from the rooftops about this. We’ve tried to explain that sports are a gateway issue, that making a group of people a threat in one sphere makes it easier to paint them as a threat in others. We’ve tried to point out that there is no scientific evidence to support these bans, or we’ve tried to shift the conversation away from the science altogether because really, at its heart, this is a human rights issue.

re__inc

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And we have watched, helplessly, as we lost ground. I think it’s safe to say that I’m not the only journalist who looks around at the current state of trans exclusion in sports and feels that I’ve failed at my job.

But what pains me the most, perhaps, has been the sheer scope of the silence from the women’s sports world. In a cruel twist, Trump signed his EO banning trans girls from girls’ sports on National Girls and Women in Sports Day. He signed it on a livestream, so the world could watch. And social media accounts said nothing, instead posting uncritically about girl power (exclamation point). They didn’t clarify whether they meant all girls, they didn’t stop to acknowledge that trans girls deserve sports, too. It has felt like I’m living in an alternate reality where my community doesn’t even exist. Or maybe that’s just living in our current reality, the one that we’ve created by allowing for the issue of trans women and girls in sports to become a debate in the first place.

Then, the following day, the NCAA announced they would be pre-emptively following Trump’s EO. I can sit here and outline all the facts: that fewer than 10 openly trans athletes are even competing at the collegiate level, that trans athletes are underrepresented at every level of sport, that this is cruel and discriminatory and and and. I can tell you that, as Nancy Armour writes at USA TODAY, there was a time when the NCAA was fearless in the face of attempted discrimination against the trans community, but that reality no longer exists.

thechrismosier

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But I don’t have it in me today. I’ve said all those things, spent years saying all those things. How many more times can I say them when they don’t seem to matter? What I wish is that the rest of the women’s sports world would be mad on our community’s behalf. That they would see trans women and girls—the most marginalized women and girls—as worth fighting for.

The NWSL Players’ Association are the only group of pro athletes that I’ve seen who has come out unequivocally in support of trans women’s right to play sports. Maybe others will follow suit in time, but I don’t have a lot of faith. Our community is grieving, and the sports world is silent.

nwsl_players

A post shared by @nwsl_players

I know that I’ll once again have a lot more to say on this topic because one thing I will never do is shut up. I’ll never stop fighting for us. I love us.

If you want to support me in continuing to do this work on behalf of my community, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription of this newsletter.

The mainstream media has proven that they don’t see the value in centering the trans community in conversations about sports. I believe we should always be centering the most marginalized community in any conversation about sports.

Thanks for being here with me.